ChooChoo

ChooChoo is an application for dynamic activity tracking in Ruby On Rails. By storing information triggered by (tracked) model changes, ChooChoo will then let you reference these changes in a dynamic and highly customizable way.

Add this to your Gemfile:

gem 'choo_choo'

Install the required choo_choo migrations:

rake choo_choo:install:migrations

And then run:

rake db:migrate

When listening for model activities through ChooCchoo you will need to set up a parent-children behaviour. In the example below, we will be using the dummy app found in spec/dummy to illustrate how ChooChoo works.

The first thing to do is to decide for a model that will act as a parent. Using the dummy app, we will go for app/models/post.rb as it is a connecting point for comments and users.

# Simply include ChooChoo::ParentNode into post.rb and you're all set
include ChooChoo::ParentNode

Now that we have a parent, let's give ChooChoo some children. In this example we will only focus on Comment model. But you can of course add as many children as you wish.

# First, include the ChooChoo::ChildNode into comment.rb
include ChooChoo::ChildNode

# And moving on, we need to tell this child where his parent is
# by simply adding this line into comment.rb
set_parent :post

So that's all you really need for setting upp ChooChoo - a simple and lightweight activity listener for your models. From here you can now get access to your activities. For instance, in your views or controller actions by the following examples.

# Get the whole related ChooChoo instance for a post
@post.activity

# Find out what the last action for the activity was
# This returns a string of 'created', 'updated' or 'deleted'
# Please do note that if a parent node is deleted you will no longer have access to the activity
@post.activity.last_action

# Get the latest changed child for the parent
# This returns the instance of the object (child) tracked by ChooChoo
@post.activity.last_updated_node

# You can also just access the reference id if you so wish by
@post.activity.last_updated_node_id

Of course, you also have access to the timestamp columns created_at and updated_at that are updated accordingly on new activities. From here, you are free to customize the ChooChoo so it fits your needs or simply use the given solution and make own customizations through views and helpers in your app that utilizes ChooChoo.

The activity.last_action contains a string of the last registered event like follows:

• created when a parent or child is created
• updated when a parent or child is updated
• deleted when a child is deleted
• destroyed when a parent is deleted (this is different because this means you lose the references to the models)

We would love some help on making this better, don't hesitate to send us a pull request.

To run the tests, you first have to make sure it's installed properly, and then clone the testing database:

rake app:db:test:clone

You can then run the tests with:

bundle exec rspec

To release to rubygems you first need to change the version.rb file to a new version, then run:

rake release